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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geoffrey Wren who wrote (14259)	4/5/2002 12:45:26 AM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78702

Hello, jeoffrey Wren: (long prattle follows) Imo, my turnover is low. Perhaps you are noticing that I post often that I am starting a new position in a stock, and perhaps you are assuming I have sold something to replace it. My preferred way to come up with funds is to trim stocks that seem to be at the "harvest" stage. Occasionally I sell losers in disgust or panic. Sometimes too, I lose patience with small winners. With lots of small buys and a few sells, the result is that I hold what most people would consider an exceptionally large number of different stocks. My basis is this: I want to buy stocks whenever I find them that seem to be undervalued, and I want to hold them until they are fully valued. My intent is to have a diverse portfolio so no one or two or three or four stocks decimate the portfolio(s). I have difficulties with these wants! -- in determining undervalued; in figuring full value (it's harder than ascertaining "undervaluedness"); and now I am having a difficult time in sitting still and holding on to some winners. I don't have a benchmark that I measure against. I have a dollar value that I'd like each of my portfolios to attain by year end. One portfolio that has an outsize position in BMY and maybe SUNW too is down for this year, and from last year also, and so is not meeting my objective. All my other portfolios are (as of a couple of days ago - not today though) at new all-time highs. I keep wandering around my house muttering to my wife and cats about how I don't understand how I can still be in the game like this. I believe I have every single debacle stock of the last twelve months (tech excepted). That's not possible of course - but I can't now recall one catastrophe that I didn't own. And since I generally hold on - until the bitter end, I have MANY dropping into bankruptcy. As examples of debacles, just off the top my head, bot. Enron @15, luckily (?) sold at 9. Bought CHEZ (a cheese maker for pizzas and a Forbes best small co.) between 11- 13. I figured you could not go wrong with this thing - sales up every year - pizzas are here to stay. Investors didn't know management cooked the books as well as the cheese-- stock closed one day at 13, and I believe opened up in bankruptcy last month at .02. There's COV which I posted on a couple of years ago when it was Ogden. Rode it from 10 to 20 back to 10 to 5 to bankruptcy (last week or so). There's AREM. (In at 15, I've been selling recently near 1). LDP, mentioned here by me, from about 8 to 30 down to about 3. ECIL which I really liked (good thing nobody else here seemed to!!) at 24 through 27, I'm now selling at about 4-5. GX, others are in there somewhere... maybe last year. I have both of today's crashes, CPW and BMY. Perhaps it's that my winners win more than my losers lose, or I'm merely in up a temporary cycle for some stocks when the whole investment scheme is based on ups and downs, and the downs for the portfolios are due to come later. Given my current frame of mind and knowing something of my personality type, regarding these losers and turnover, my opinion (for today and subject to change) is that it's somewhat in my nature that I hold on too long and don't turn 'em over enough. fwiw, Paul Senior